Snow

On the evening of Sunday 1st February 2009 it started to snow in London. This is a rare occurrence. Rarer still is heavy snowfall, and even rarer is heavy snowfall that settles and doesn’t immediately turn into mush.I’d been holed up in a dark room with the blinds down, watching DVDs for hours, and I was just on my way to bed when I happened to look through a window in another room and noticed how much snow had fallen and that it had settled. So despite being tired and ready to sleep, I got dressed again (very dressed in fact) and picked up the camera & tripod and went out trudging through powdery virgin snow, even in the middle of the roads as seemingly it was only me and the foxes making the first impressions in the new landscape.

I returned home at about 4am, and then went out again at lunchtime the next day, to see how the rest of the world was dealing with the sudden change in environment.

On Monday morning I was most annoyed to hear the BBC describe the event as “the worst snowfall in the south east for 18 years”. Worst? Seemed wonderful to me. I could understand if they said “heaviest” or “deepest” but “worst” sounded more like the opinion of business than news.

The atmosphere that the snow created was very noticeable. There was a lot more interaction between strangers than happens normally, a lot of conversations that would never otherwise have taken place.